Sky has announced Sky Travel will be renamed Sky Real Lives from November 7.

The new channel will have a greater focus on programmes with a human interest story and be targeted more at women in the 35-54 age range.

Barbara Gibbon, head of Sky Travel, said: "We have decided to separate the travel business from our programming on the core channel - this will significantly improve the service from both viewers and travel customers."

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"Sky Travel was originally launched so that customers could watch travel programmes to see what holidays were like before they booked them. Now you can go anywhere online to look up a destination," she added.

New content for the channel includes Risky Business, an observational documentary which follows a couple opening a luxury hotel in Cheltenham with the backing of actor John Malcovich, and co-productions with ITV regions such as Conquer the Castle, an STV series which follows a group of people trying to survive in a remote castle in Perthshire.

As part of the repositioning, Sky Travel +1 will be renamed Sky Real Lives +1, with Sky Travel Extra becoming Sky Real Lives 2. Sky Travel Shop will now be called Sky Travel.

Travel programmes will still feature on Sky Real Lives, but the holiday 'showcase' and shopping aspect of the channel will now be focused on the new Sky Travel channel and online. The Sky Travel website will now become sky.com/travel.

"We see this as a great opportunity to grow the holiday sales business via the huge online traffic passing through sky.com," Gibbon added.

Sky's in-house creative team worked on the rebrand, which includes a "substantial" marketing budget to promote the renamed channel portfolio.

The repositioning follows on from Sky's rebranding of its movie channels to genre-based strands earlier this year, and the renaming of Artsworld to Sky Arts.